The name at the bottom of the page was Dolores Kemp, Notary Public, State of West Virginia. I stared at it until the letters swam. Dolores was the president of my book club. She had sat beside me for eleven years, passing the wine and arguing over novels. Above her stamp was a document titled Durable Power of Attorney, naming Spencer Pratt as my agent in all matters of money and property, dated three weeks earlier. At the bottom was my signature, or what looked like it. “Evelyn,” said Dr. Abernathy quietly, “did you sign this?” “No,” I whispered. “I was at the hairdresser that day.”
He leaned back in the old leather chair and rubbed his eyes. “The medicine in those yellow capsules is a strong sedative that clouds the memory,” he said. “It is not meant for blood pressure or anything else you take. Given for a few months, it makes a person agreeable and forgetful. Given for a year, it makes her unable to defend herself in court.” He tapped the report. “I do not believe that Spencer wants to hurt you. I believe he wants you easy to manage, so that someone can sign papers in your name.” I thought of the farm of my father in Clay County and the gas wells that paid me royalties I never talked about.
It came together in my head like the pieces of a kindergarten puzzle. Seven years earlier, a gas company had leased the mineral rights under the land of my father, and the royalties had been piling up quietly in an account at the Charleston bank. Nearly six million dollars. I had never touched it, because I was a retired teacher with a Cape Cod and a garden, and I did not need more than I had. Spencer had asked about my grandfather once, at dinner. I remembered thinking how kind it was of him to be interested. The book club, I realized, had stopped inviting me because Dolores had told them I was losing my mind.
A yellow capsule hidden in her bra gave one aunt the weekend to bring Evelyn back to the Cape Cod in Charleston.
Dr. Abernathy did not hesitate. He picked up the telephone and called the elder abuse unit of the state attorney general, and then a young trooper he had known since the boy was in diapers. By two in the afternoon I was sitting at my own kitchen table, with a pharmacist from the hospital who had brought my real blood pressure pills in a locked bag. I swallowed the correct one with a glass of water. My daughter Heather, in Florida, answered on the first ring and said, “Mom, I am getting on the next plane.” She landed in Charleston at nine that night with a suitcase and a face like a thundercloud.
Spencer came home the next evening, whistling, with a bunch of tulips. He found me at the table with Heather, the trooper and the lawyer from the attorney general. He stopped in the doorway. The tulips slipped from his hand. “Evie,” he said, and then he said nothing more. He sat down heavily and told it all. It had been the idea of his aunt Dolores, he said, and she had helped him find the pills. He had told himself they were gentle. He had told himself it would only be for a year. He looked at me with watery eyes. “I did love your garden,” he whispered, and that was the cruelest part.
I set my terms the way I used to set rules for a classroom of five year olds, plainly and kindly and without room for argument. He would give a sworn statement against Dolores and anyone else involved. He would hand over every copy of the false power of attorney. He would pay for every doctor visit I needed until my head was clear. And he would leave my house that night, with only the clothes on his back and the tulips he had brought, which I told him to plant in the front yard so that something good would come of the evening. Spencer nodded, picked up the tulips and walked out into the dusk.
The surprise came on the second Thursday, when the book club arrived at my door. All ten of them, with covered dishes and red eyes, including two who had not spoken to me for a year. Dolores had told them I was confused, they said, and that I had asked them to stay away. Marjorie, the oldest, stepped forward with a paper bag. Inside were forty tulip bulbs, tied with a ribbon. “Evelyn,” she said, “we are so ashamed. We came to ask if we may plant them with you.” I laughed until I cried, and we spent the whole afternoon on our knees in the flower bed.
The consequences were quick. Dolores Kemp lost her notary commission and was charged with fraud and conspiracy to exploit an elderly person. Spencer was dismissed from the bank in Pittsburgh, and the penthouse lease was not renewed. The gas company, hearing of the matter, froze the transfer of the lease until a judge appointed a guardian ad litem to review my accounts, and the judge, an old student of mine from the kindergarten of nineteen eighty one, declared me in excellent mental health. He signed the order with a flourish, and he winked.
With part of the royalties, I started a program that I called the Bulb and Branch Fund. It pays for free legal clinics, memory screenings and a trusted volunteer notary for seniors in Kanawha County who fear someone is taking advantage of them. We held the first clinic in the basement of my church. Sixty two people came. A man of eighty seven with a cane sat down at the table with a stack of papers and whispered, “I think my nephew has been signing my name.” A young lawyer took his hand and said, “Sir, we are going to look into that right now.”
The following April, the tulips bloomed along my front walk, red and yellow and white, all forty of them, nodding in the wind. Heather and I sat on the porch steps with two cups of tea. The ten ladies of the book club came down the sidewalk, one at a time, each carrying a book and a covered dish. Marjorie sat beside me and took my hand. “Evie,” she said, “what are we reading this month?” I looked at the flowers, and at my daughter, and at the tulip nearest my feet, and I smiled. “Something with a happy ending,” I said.